Living the dream in Milton Keynes – why it’s my kind of town

The archetypal new town is creating jobs faster than anywhere in the UK, but remains maligned for its ordered grids and concrete cows. Outsiders just don’t understand the oddities and ironies that give the place its soul

When people talk about Milton Keynes, they tend to mention two things: concrete cows and roundabouts. Why, you might ask, aren’t they marvelling over how one can get to Bletchley on the train in four minutes, Leighton Buzzard in 11 minutes, Cheddington in 17? Or how there are two Costas, two Prets and two Starbucks in the same shopping centre? There’s little justice in new-town world. Cows and roundabouts are what stick.

But I have lived there, and I want to offer an appreciation of Milton Keynes. I’m fond of the place. I grew up in the surrounding area – a 10-minute drive away – and until recently lived in a flat smack in the city centre, above a Café Rouge, opposite a Nando’s, a Zizzi, a Las Iguanas, with the Argos headquarters to the rear, a Jury’s Inn on one flank and an enormous Sainsbury’s on the other. Dear reader, you’re right: I was living the dream.

The thing is, MK has its own style. For instance, in MK we all lean to the right. Not politically speaking, but physically. It’s those roundabouts again. Just check the tyres on any Milton-Keynesian car – always more worn on the right than the left. So we affect a special lean. That’s MK style. Getting lost down a street that looks like the last seven you’ve covered? Also MK style. Getting palpitations when you go a hundred yards without coming across a roundabout? MK style. A glass-sheeted city of endless reflections: the epitome of MK style.

I’m a writer, a bookish soul, so style preoccupies me. Books offer particular ways of seeing. Their style becomes a perception that we take on. Milton Keynes, then, is specifically a JG Ballard novel – all concrete and chrome; hard-edged; made up of odd juxtapositions. Sometimes it can feel a bit Martin Amis, too – cartoonish, built on extremes, vibrating with a repressed satirical energy. When I was a kid, MK was a Roald Dahl story – lots of hairy-faced men in the shopping centre, the great glass elevator in John Lewis that presumably could fly, and peaches from M&S that, frankly, disappointed.

Living in MK can also feel like living in one big art installation designed by a smirking postmodernist – which I love. There’s the Point, opened in 1985, the UK’s first true multiplex cinema. It rises from the concrete grid like a pyramid – a rusty skeleton of red bars meeting above a triangular structure of black blocks – but a pyramid for a lesser Pharaoh, like Wazner or Thesh, unremembered and uncelebrated. A pyramid for Rob Lowe or Emilio Estevez. Despite its historical reputation, it feels forgotten and fatigued, like the old man at a party who insists on his significant past (trials for West Ham, more sexual partners than is humanly possible). But no one’s paying attention. The glory days are gone.

Then there’s the Xscape building (the Point’s usurper), a leaden humpback whale washed up in the middle of a big car park. And, of course, those cows, petrified into one long stony moo. Everywhere you go, the energy is offbeat. Maybe it’s an acquired taste, but it suits me down to the concrete-gridded ground.

It would be remiss not to mention the city’s heartbeat among this list of curiosities: the huge shopping centre, which, to most, justifies MK’s existence. It’s an ecological and temporal wonder. It has a tropical region (those alien-looking ferns and palm trees that line the concourses); an English pastoral (an oak tree with the flu in the centre – “acute oak decline” to be precise – with the obedient concrete cows huddled beneath its cropped and crippled arms); an artful bronze age (bronze statues nestled in unexpected places); an austere industrial age (up in the multistorey, out back in the humming warehouses); and the dizzying future of its traffic skyscape (look up and you’ll see delivery vehicles negotiating the rooftops overhead).

The key to unlocking MK’s strange beauty is what Keats called “negative capability” – the ability to exist in contraries. After all, this is a place built on a grid system, configured by dual-carriageways, roundabouts, subways and bridges, yet it’s one of the greenest cities you could find, the interstices of said grid blooming with copious trees (some 20m in the urban area alone). It’s also a city with an indoor ski range (a bit strange) and, soon, driverless cars (very strange, though this suggests an absent-presence that seems somehow true to the MK experience). And let’s not forget my favourite Milton-Keynesian irony: the city isn’t a city at all. The centre is invariably referred to as the city centre, and numerous societies and clubs include “city” in their titles. But it’s not a city, it’s a town (whisper it; this kind of thought is treasonous in these parts). You’ve got to love the ambition though.

The concrete-and-glass exterior of the Quadrant in Milton Keynes. Photograph: Alamy

MK was designed on utopian principles. The grid, for instance, is meant to give the place order and pattern, what with its fixed map of symmetries and reliable right-angles, its carefully sequenced roundabouts and neat aisles of trees. Every road has its parallel, every spot its coordinate. You always know where you are with Milton Keynes. Above all, utopias are meant to give the sense of a frame within which to live. And Milton Keynes is a place of multiple frames. Because it’s a grid.

But frames presuppose something beyond. They create the possibility of stepping outside of the frame. And the real MK, to my mind, is the stuff that does exactly this; the stuff that goes overlooked. It’s the little oddities and ironies, the blemishes within the self-imposed symmetries, that give the place its soul. These quiet rebellions are everywhere to be discovered. They’re there in the hidden pocket parks, entered through portals between office buildings like Alice through the rabbit hole. They’re there in the tumbling ivy and blossoms that pour over the low walls alongside the highways like something from an HG Wells novel.

In MK, the modern and natural co-exist – lines of trees fattened on dual-carriageway mucus, densely vegetated roundabouts like conservation sites. But it somehow feels as if the modern is the older element, and the natural greens and browns and maroons are a newer supplement. New is old and old is new. A place of poetic ironies. That’s Milton Keynes. That’s the place I love. (And, let’s face it, utopias tend to be hells: everyone the same; everything levelled; a general mediocrity. Too many attractive anomalies in MK for that.)

Milton Keynes will always be the home of concrete cows and roundabouts. These are two facts not easily shaken off. But I want to add something else into the mix: Milton Keynes’s public art; the many sculptures and statues scattered about the landscape. London might have Nelson’s column, the north its angel, Manchester its Alan Turing. But here in Milton Keynes we have: Greg Rutherford … on a roundabout.

There he is, the long-jumper suspended in mid-flight on a traffic island, a man made of metal. As you approach this statue from the east on the A421, something else catches the eye, directly beside Greg’s roundabout. A huge industrial unit, painted in a spectrum of blues so that it merges with the sky and looks like the mirage of a pool. Once you’ve picked this out of thin air, you notice the large “River Island” emblazoned across the side. And then a quintessentially Milton-Keynesian pun (unintentional, made from a random juxtaposition) becomes clear: Greg Rutherford is leaping from his island into an imaginary river. River island, indeed. You just have to look outside the frame. Because outside of the frame is where all the fun is to be had. That’s MK style.